Eric Wilson

The Savage Republic: De Indis of Hugo Grotius, Republicanism and Dutch Hegemony Within the Early Modern World-system (C.1600-1619) Eric Wilson

Intended for the professional academic and graduate student, this book is the first to utilize the methodology of "New Stream" legal scholarship in an extended critical "exegesis" of Hugo Grotius' "De Indis" (c.1604-6). "De Indis" is predicated upon a two-fold discursive strategy: investing "private" Trading Companies with "public" international legal personality, and collapsing the distinction between "private" and "public" warfare. Governing the operation of textual interpretation is "De Indis'" status as a republican treatise juridically legitimating an early modern Trans-National corporation (the VOC) that served as an agent of a "primitive" system of global governance, the early Capitalist World-Economy. The application of New Stream scholarship reveals that the republican signature of "De Indis" consists of a discursive "micro-oscillation" between the "thick" ontology of Late Scholasticism ("Utopia") and the "thin" ontology of Civic Humanism ("Apology") wholly appropriate to the governance requirements of the embryonic Modern World-System.